The invention relates to telecommunications networks, and more particularly to advanced architectures for the description of telecommunication services.
The feature-interaction problem arises from the incremental, feature-by-feature, extension of telecommunications system functionality. As new features such as call forwarding, call waiting, or three-way calling have been added to telecommunication systems, it has become increasingly difficult to manage the behavioral complexity of the features and their interactions. Redesign of old features to fit smoothly with the new features is scarcely ever a practical option. Eventually, the resulting complexity damages the quality and productivity of all phases of telecommunication software development.
In the pending utility application, xe2x80x9cTelecommunication System and Method,xe2x80x9d Ser. No. 09/034,681, filed on Mar. 4, 1998, which is incorporated by reference herein, the inventors introduced an architecture for managing the feature-interaction problem. The inventors presented a virtual architecture for telecommunication systems, which they called distributed feature composition (DFC), in which a feature corresponds to a component type; each telephone call is handled by building a configuration of instances of these components, according to the features to be applied to that particular call. The feature component instances communicate by featureless internal calls that are connected by the underlying architectural substrate. A new feature is specified by describing its corresponding component type (or occasionally, two component types) and the rules for including the component instances into configurations. In the pending utility applications, xe2x80x9cRouting Extensions For Telecommunications Network System And Method,xe2x80x9d Ser. No. 09/644,128, filed Aug. 23, 2000, and xe2x80x9cProtocol Extensions For Telecommunications Network Systems and Method,xe2x80x9d Ser. No. 09/644,461, filed Aug. 23, 2000, xe2x80x9cSignaling/Media Separation for Telecommunication Network System and Method,xe2x80x9d Ser. No. 09/716,102, filed on Nov. 17, 2000, which are incorporated by reference herein, the inventors enhanced and modified DFC to accommodate open telecommunication systems, mobile telecommunication users, multimedia telecommunication services, unified messaging, and other aspects of modern telecommunication systems and services.
As discussed in the above-mentioned pending applications, DFC xe2x80x9caddress dataxe2x80x9d is data in the distributed feature system associated directly with individual addresses. The location of this data is an important problem, for several reasons. Its size is directly proportional to the number of addresses in use, which means that a successful DFC-like network will have a large quantity of DFC address data to manage. DFC address data is used frequently by routers and feature boxes in the above schemes, so access to it should be quick. Finally, DFC address data is data that describes or belongs to customers, and is therefore subject to many concerns about security, privacy, and protection behind administrative boundaries.
A distributed features system is disclosed which permits a telecommunication network to efficiently distribute data related to network addresses. In accordance with an aspect of the invention, the routing scheme of the distributed feature system permits address data to be partitioned across a plurality of nodes such that the address data and feature modules subscribed to by the address data can be located at the same node. The routing algorithm can be designed so thatxe2x80x94as a communication usage unfoldsxe2x80x94it never requires the data or feature modules of more than one address at a time. A communication usage unfolds within the node where an address is located, adding its feature modules and using its slice of the routing data, until the need for this address is exhausted and a different address becomes relevant. The node consults a service which identifies the node at which is located the address data needed for the usage. Then, the usage can jump to the location of the new address and continue to unfold, ultimately assembling the modules in a usage that spans the different nodes. This approach advantageously requires only one copy of a slice of the address data in the distributed feature system. The routing in the distributed feature system always has local access to address-partitioned routing data, and all feature modules have local access to their address-partitioned operational data.
These and other aspects and advantages of the invention will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art by reference to the following detailed description and the accompanying drawings.